Coopernundrums

Birthdays are strange things, the more you have the more you try and pretend they don’t matter, and the more people try and tell you they are not so bad. I’m not really sure why it is that people think they are bad things, Its true, you are getting older, but as someone just said to me “who isn’t getting older every day?” -  I think the problem people associate with birthdays has more to do with the fact that a birthday throws into sharp focus all the things they think they should have done, but have not . I certainly understand that feeling, though I think it’s more a way of clarifying the things that I have not yet done, that I most want to do – a kind of personal re-ordering of the to-do list. They only need to be depressed is if on your birthday you realized that your re-ordered to-do list is exactly the same as it was last year. That leaves you with a feeling of having accomplished nothing, and not going anywhere. I’m fortunate enough to have not had that experience this year. I look back at where I was last year and look at the fundamental things that have changed since then:

-         I am making more money than I made a year ago.

-         I am driving a newer, better car than I was a year ago.

-         My Family is in pretty good health, and happy.

-         I feel like I have gotten closer with my friends.

Also Since it’s my birthday, I want to remember some people who share my birthday:

Christopher Noth is an actor in American film, stage and television. He is best known for two long-running television roles: as Detective Mike Logan on Law & Order / Law and Order : Criminal Intent, and as “Mr. Big” on Sex and the City.  He is one of my very favorit “gritty ” cops on TV today.

Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. As author of such great works as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he was greatly admired by many authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov and others. Most modernist writers dismissed him, as a poor writer who did not write within their narrow definition of literature. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson’s popularity and allow him a place in the canon.

Whoopi Goldberg (born Caryn Elaine Johnson), is an Academy Award, Daytime Emmy Award, Golden Globe, Tony, BAFTA and Grammy Award-winning American comedian, film actress and radio DJ. Whoopi is one of only a few individuals (including Barbra Streisand, Mel Brooks, Rita Moreno, Audrey Hepburn and Helen Hayes) who have won an Oscar, a Tony, an Emmy, and a Grammy. She also is the second black female performer to win an Academy Award for acting (the first being Hattie McDaniel), and currently is the only black female performer to be nominated for an Oscar more than once. I should add that I truly enjoy her work.

I officially turn 35 on Thursday November the 13^th.  I will be in the middle of a week’s vacation that day.  I hope to spend the day with friends and family, have a nice piece of pie, thats right PIE,  and reflect on all the things that are good in my life.  Thanks for reading!

A young ventriloquist was doing a show in Marco Island . With his dummy on his knee, he started going through his usual dumb blonde jokes, when a blonde in the second row stood on her chair and started shouting:’I've heard enough of your stupid blond jokes,’ she screamed. ‘What makes you think you can stereotype women in that way? What does the color of a person’s hair have to do with her worth as a human being? It’s people like you who keep women like me from being respected at work and in the community and from reaching our full potential as people. It’s all because you and your kind continue to perpetuate discrimination against not only blondes, but women in general – and all in the name of humor. The embarrassed ventriloquist began to apologize, whereupon the blonde yelled, ‘You stay out of this, I’m talking to that little guy on your lap’

Every comic book hero worth his salt has an archenemy. Batman has the Joker, James Bond has Dr. No, Luke Skywalker has Darth Vader, and Santa Claus has Krampus. Wait a minute, Santa has an archenemy?
     Krampus is one of those quirky survivals of a pagan tradition that preceded Christianity Much like Santa himself. Or Jesus Oops, did I say Jesus? Never mind.
      Santa Claus is a Christianization of a handful of traditional winter solstice figures, who morphed into St. Nicholas after the Catholics swarmed into Austria.
      Santa was most heavily influenced by the Norse Thor, who had a long white beard and cheerfully rode a flying chariot. The enemy of good in Norse mythology was Loki, a figure usually depicted as falling somewhere in the range between Satan himself and Carrot Top.
      Loki was a devil-trickster figure with big horns. (Of course, most Norse gods were wearing horns on their hats if they didn’t have them growing out of their heads.) While the noble Thor was a good candidate for transformation into a Christian saint, Loki was not so much. But old gods never die, they just fade away. The lingering afterimage of Loki became part of the template for Krampus.
      The tradition is primarily an Austrian thing, although it spread erratically around Europe. There are two takes on Krampus, one being a secular humanist approach and the other being a magic tradition angle. If you put any two Austrians in a room, they’ll soon get into an fistfight about which interpretation is correct.
      In the secular humanist approach, Krampus and the observation of Krampus traditions are pretty much just the antithesis of Santa Claus. On Dec. 5, the eve of the feast day of St. Nick, Austrians celebrate Krampus by running across the city in grotesque masks and generally scaring children. This is an extension of the good-cop, bad-cop theory. St. Nick makes his rounds on Dec. 6 rewarding all the good little children, a task which is made easy since Krampus has been out the night before, punishing pretty much the same children with a good switching.
      In other variations on the theme (and there a lot of variations considering what a relatively small geographical area we’re talking about here), Krampus is one of Santa’s minions, who follows along obediently passing out presents or switches depending on the moral turpitude of the child in question. Presumably, this would make the pointy-eared Krampus kind of the template for Santa’s elves in later Rankin-Bass productions, but the jury is still out among the scholarly community on this subject. Then, all the adults go out and gets drunk, and much hilarity ensues.
      The other interpretation of Krampus is more mystical. Under this theory, people dress up in the hideous masks of Krampus in order to scare off evil spirits.
      If so, this is in keeping with a pretty universal traditional use of masks in religious ritual; the concept of a fearsome visage that wards off cowardly evil spirits has a lot of pedigree, and not just in the snowy mountains of Germanic Europe where people get a little unbalanced in the winter (remember Krystallnacht?).
      In Hindu mythology, Black Makhala fills the Krampus role, while the Japanese wore masks that were supposed to be lions, but frankly look more like Benji.The Krampus masks benefit from being particularly grotesque, or to be more accurate, stupid-looking. Let’s just say Hindus have a better aesthetic sense than Austrians. Krampus masks suffer from the silliness of the whole Christian devil image, but occasionally he’s presented as passably scary looking. Especially if you’re eight years old. 
      One of the relative benefits of paganism over Christianity is that paganism usually has holidays devoted to wild orgiastic excess. The Celts indulged in this behavior around Easter, which led to the adoption of the Easter bunny as mascot for the Christian version. Austrians liked to keep warm during those cold winter months, if you catch my drift.
      Once the Christians criminalized orgiastic excess, the Krampus-fertility nexus evolved into more of a taboo-stalker kind of scenario, in which the devilish figure, traditionally depicted with a swollen foot-long red tongue, malevolently thrusts himself on nubile women who are eternally “protesting” his advances. But not protesting too much. After all, he had a foot-long red tongue.
      A cottage industry in Austria from Victorian times through the present has been the production of Krampus postcards to commemorate the holiday season. These tend to feature Krampus and his prodigious tongue assailing various Betti Page-type pinup girls (or even pure-hearted Austrian housefraus) with his lecherous advances.
      During World War II, Krampus shamefully pandered to the Nazis in such postcards, doing a series of propaganda appearances in which he trounced and embarrassed British and French citizens and soldiers. After WWII, it was rumored that Krampus fled to Brazil and took part in an evil cloning scheme, but my team of investigators has failed to confirm those reports.

Happy Holidays all!